7.3 Douglas Kearney: "Red Read / Read Red: Depictions of Violence in Poetry"
Welcome to the third episode of Season Seven of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry podcast.
Season Seven is comprised of lectures written and delivered by Douglas Kearney during his tenure as a Bagley Wright Lecturer. Today we'll hear "Red Read / Read Red: Depictions of Violence in Poetry." This talk was originally given March 24, 2021, at Portland Literary Arts, via Zoom.
Douglas Kearney has long written about the conflation of violence and entertainment in U.S. American culture, from badman folklore to postcards of lynchings. Still, there are questions that haunt. What are the ethics of representing violence? How might poetic aestheticizations of brutality transform, reinscribe, or abet violence? Through a series of vignettes in which Kearney entangles his encounters with violence as a reader and his own attempts to put it down on the page, the poet investigates what compels him about the subject.
Visit us at our website, www.bagleywrightlectures.org, for more information about Bagley Wright lecturers, as well as links to supplementary materials on each lecturer’s archive page, including selected writings.
Douglas Kearney's book based on his BWLS lectures, Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022) is forthcoming in November, and is available for preorder here.
Music: "I Recall" by Blue Dot Sessions
from the Free Music Archive
CC BY NC
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